Tag Archives: puzzle

Review: The Curse of the Wolves Escape Puzzle from Ravensburger

Escape Puzzle

Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00479

I received a copy of the Escape Puzzle: The Curse of the Wolves from Ravensburger to try out and review. Opinions are my own.Each April vacation we try and keep things low key. When I was at Toy Fair this year I knew that we would be heading to upstate New York to a quiet AirBNB to spend quality family time. That turned into the whole Coronavirus quarantine and we ended up having to cancel that trip but we spent plenty of quality family time together. Luckily we still had the puzzle that we would be working on together.

I noticed the Escape Puzzle called The Curse of the Wolves at the Ravensburger booth and it was something I had never heard of or seen before. You solve the puzzle but you also have to figure out how to escape from the tricky situation that you find yourself in from the puzzle. In this case you stumble upon five wolves in the forest. What do you do to escape.

further along

What makes this 759 piece puzzle tricky is that what you see on the front of the box is not what the final puzzle will look like. This is the first time that I have ever worked on a puzzle like that before. While many of the elements that are on the box are also found within the image on the final puzzle things are not in the same place and many other things are added. I spent several hours the first day building the frame for the puzzle and even then I had pieces left over ad the frame feels too big on one side than the other. I feel like there were some intentionally added extra pieces or something.

I knew that there were five wolves in the final puzzle so I began working on finding and assembling the wolves. Then I left it for a while and Allison picked it up and she put everything together in the middle of the puzzle. She put the wolves in their spots and filled in lots of gaps. However, that was the easiest part of things because now we just have colors and lots of dark pieces to put down and very little clue as to where they now go.

After Allison got it

Here is where we left it after the week and we’ll go back over the next week or so to try again to complete the puzzle and solve the mystery.

The puzzle itself is really good quality. the pieces fit together easily and the artwork is good. The concept of an escape room type puzzle is very interesting and I am looking forward to solving this mystery.

While at Toy Fair Ravensburger also gave us a credit to use to make our own puzzles with our own photos. We had one made up for my parents as a thank you for having us at the Cape this Summer. We decided to give ti to them early because puzzles are a great thing to do when you have plenty of time. My dad really enjoys them and now he can make one with his favorite grandkids on it.

ThinkFun Pocket Brainteasers

Pocket BrainteasersThinkFun sent me four of their Pocket Brainteasers to play with and review. The opinions expressed are my own.

When I received these new Pocket Brainteasers from ThinkFun I brought them with me to Andrew’s karate class. We were there early so it was nice to have something to do with Andrew that was not him asking to use my phone. The Pocket Brainteasers have four levels of difficulty. Each puzzle can be solved, even though I still cannot figure out the solution for the Fifth Chair. As we played more kids and parents came over and tried out the games with us. At one point it was me and another dad trying to figure out the Fifth Chair and REC-TANGLE. REC-TANGLE was one that took me a while but once I figured it out it was such an Ah-Ha moment.

The nice thing about these is that they can travel well and can keep kids and parents alike occupied for some time as they try to solve the puzzle. You can put them in the seat back pockets of your car or in a purse. I do like that the REC-TANGLE’s case has a cover and is the most perfect puzzle for travelling. The 4 Piece Puzzle would also travel well because it can be one piece that is super hard to take apart so you won’t worry about losing the pieces. But the 4-T Puzzle and the Fifth Chair do not have cases and I would have liked to have seen one for each of these.

You can find out more about these Pocket Brainteasers at https://www.thinkfun.com/products/pocket-brainteasers/ These are $6.99 each and are for ages 8+.